By Chris |
Posted: Friday, 30 April 2010
Wege & Waldstille, for clarinet, percussion, piano, cello and electronics, will be premièred by the fantastic Psappha at 17:00 on Friday 30 April in the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama. These guys really know how to play and it’s been an absolute pleasure hearing them rehearse, so come along! The concert also features works by other University of Manchester postgraduate composers (almost all world premières) — Soojung Park’s Looking over the Land, Josh Kopeček’s the warrior fallen, Mauricio Pauly’s La Prisa Educable and Yvonne Eccles’s Multiple Infections.
Listings: Facebook / Psappha / Venue
By Chris |
Posted: Sunday, 18 April 2010
Raise Your Voice Collective, which I help run, have just announced the line-up for their second outing of contemporary classical, experimental electronics and chilled-out beats at Centro Bar in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. It’s an exciting mix, stretching from Martin Suckling’s Passacaglie for cello and electronics originally written to make use of the Hyperbow developed at MIT, via the sordidly urban angular lines and irregular rhythms of Tom Coult’s Avian Riots, to Steve Pycroft’s Richter VS Dragon, which applies re-mixing and mash-up techniques to instrumental music, and ending with a live DJ set from Al Sonar of Hit&Run. Also among the pieces being played will be my piece The Golden Lion Hotel for percussion and electronics.
The night is Friday 14 May and takes place as part of the FutureEverything Festival Showcase. Check out the Raise Your Voice website for more details.
By Chris |
Posted: Thursday, 15 April 2010
At 17:00 on April 30th contemporary music group Psappha will perform a new work of mine, Wege & Waldstille, for clarinet, handheld percussion, piano, cello and electronics (see event listing). In writing it I thought a fair amount further about silence and near-silence in my music, how it can behave and how it can become a construction material in its own right. Here are a few more thoughts on that subject.
In A Book of Silence
, Sara Maitland observes that, ‘Silence has no narrative. Silence intensifies sensation, but blurs the sense of time.’ Silence was one of the first things I came to explore when I started having music performed. Before I had experienced the gripping vacuum at the heart of Helmut Lachenmann’s Gran Torso, before I had heard Luigi Nono’s Fragmente-Stille sparkle on the horizon, before I knew how Salvatore Sciarrino’s music can totter and weave on the brink of audibility, even before I had read John Cage’s Silence
or understood 4'33" in any real way, silence was something I discovered, uncovered and loved. Read More »
By Chris |
Posted: Sunday, 4 April 2010
You can now hear some of my music online at my Bandcamp page and I’ll be adding some more recordings in a few weeks. Bandcamp lets you upload high-quality audio and offer it for both streaming and download in a wide range of formats, so if you like what you hear, help yourself to a free download in whichever shape or size suits you.
The contemporary music collective Raise Your Voice, which I run with Rob Guy and Steve Pycroft, is also using Bandcamp. Check out the recording of the Raise Your Voice launch night here.
